Joseph Lopez is a convicted killer from Colorado who would plead guilty to the murder of Natalie Bollinger
According to court documents Natalie Bollinger was a nineteen year old living in Denver Colorado when she posted on Craigslist that she was looking for someone to kill her. Joseph Lopez would answer the ad and soon after the Craigslist ad was removed. The two would meet and planned on a place for Lopez to kill her at least according to Joseph.
Natalie Bollinger parents would report their daughter missing and the next day her body would be found in a wooded area
Joseph Lopez would be connected to Natalie Bollinger through his phone records and would eventually admit to murdering Natalie after attempting to tell police she killed herself
Joseph Lopez would be arrested, plead guilty to avoid a life sentence and was sentence to 48 years in prison
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| Name: LOPEZ, JOSEPH M Age: 28 Ethnicity: HISPANIC Gender: MALE Hair Color: BLACK Eye Color: HAZEL Height: 5′ 08″ Weight: 241 | DOC Number: 183013 Est. Parole Eligibility Date: 03/21/2052 Next Parole Hearing Date: Dec 2051 This offender is scheduled on the Parole Board agenda for the month and year above. Please contact the facility case manager for the exact date. Est. Mandatory Release Date: 03/21/2064 Est. Sentence Discharge Date: Current Facility Assignment: FREMONT CORRECTIONAL FACILITY |
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Joseph Lopez Case
A 23-year-old man who told police that a teenage girl hired him on Craigslist to kill her was sentenced Monday to 48 years in prison
Joseph Michael Lopez pleaded guilty in Adams County District Court to second-degree murder for killing 19-year-old Natalie Bollinger in exchange for a dismissal of the first-degree murder charge prosecutors originally filed, online court records show. The maximum penalty for second-degree murder is 48 years in prison, while a first-degree murder charge carries a minimum sentence of life in prison and a maximum penalty of execution.
Deputies used Bollinger’s phone records to find Lopez, who lied multiple times to investigators before admitting to shooting and killing the teen, whom he met the day he killed her.
Bollinger’s family reported the teen missing on Dec. 28, 2017. The next day, a passerby found her body in a wooded area near Riverdale Road in Thornton.
An autopsy report released Feb. 1 found that Bollinger died from a single gunshot wound to the head and had a potentially lethal amount of heroin in her blood when she was killed.
Adams County Sheriff’s Office deputies arrested Lopez a week later after tracking him through Bollinger’s phone records. When investigators contacted Lopez, he told them that he knew why they wanted to talk to him, Sheriff Michael McIntosh said while announcing the arrest.
Lopez told investigators that he met Bollinger on Dec. 28 after he found an ad the teen posted on Craigslist’s dating section titled “I want to put a hit on myself,” according to his arrest affidavit. They met later that day and looked for a place where Bollinger could die.
Joseph Lopez, who was working at Domino’s Pizza in Thornton, then gave investigators multiple accounts of how Bollinger died.
First, he said that he and Bollinger couldn’t find a good site for the killing, so he took her back home. Lopez changed his story after deputies confronted Lopez with phone data that showed he had been in the area where Bollinger’s body was found. He then said that Bollinger killed herself in that area even as he pleaded with her to not do it.
But when police told him Bollinger’s autopsy report showed that someone else killed her, Lopez admitted to shooting her in the head, according to the affidavit. He told police that he was shaking when he pulled the trigger and had to look away.
During his interview with police, Lopez mentioned that he kept a journal in high school in which he wrote stories about kidnapping people, torturing them and executing them, according to the affidavit.